The day after Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk blasted his Tesla Roadster into space, his electric car company's mounting losses brought him back to Earth again.

Tesla posted a record quarterly net loss of US$675 million ($940m) in the fourth quarter, up from a net loss of US$121m in the same period a year ago.

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Tesla lost US$1.96 billion ($2.7b) for the full year, a record for the company and nearly three times its loss of US$675m in 2016. Tesla has never made a full-year profit since it went public in 2010. Tesla's total revenue for 2017 was US$11.8b, which was also in line with analysts' forecasts.

Channex757 wrote:

Technically it isn't lost money. Tesla makes a decent margin on sales. The "loss" is best considered a deficit, much of which is actually invested in the business. Their R&D plus capital expenditure remains high, which is why Wall Street keeps the faith with Elon.

The cars have jumped the production cost barrier and now have a healthy profit. Tesla spends on superchargers, sales locations, service centres, Model 3 ramp-up, prototyping new vehicles, all sorts of stuff the Big Three never do. Which ones (apart from vague promises) are building out international fast charging networks? It all costs..

casinterest wrote:

Channex757 wrote:

Technically it isn't lost money. Tesla makes a decent margin on sales. The "loss" is best considered a deficit, much of which is actually invested in the business. Their R&D plus capital expenditure remains high, which is why Wall Street keeps the faith with Elon.

The cars have jumped the production cost barrier and now have a healthy profit. Tesla spends on superchargers, sales locations, service centres, Model 3 ramp-up, prototyping new vehicles, all sorts of stuff the Big Three never do. Which ones (apart from vague promises) are building out international fast charging networks? It all costs..

Tesla has made a large investment in their future. The biggest problem they have right now, is that they can't meet demand. That is a problem many companies wish they had. . I think we will know more as Q2 ends this year where Tesla is in production. They need to be getting closer to 5,000 cars a week, and get to 20,000 a week by 2020. I still don't know how they will do it with one facility. I think at some point they will need to open new plants.

Channex757 wrote:

casinterest wrote:

Channex757 wrote:

Technically it isn't lost money. Tesla makes a decent margin on sales. The "loss" is best considered a deficit, much of which is actually invested in the business. Their R&D plus capital expenditure remains high, which is why Wall Street keeps the faith with Elon.

The cars have jumped the production cost barrier and now have a healthy profit. Tesla spends on superchargers, sales locations, service centres, Model 3 ramp-up, prototyping new vehicles, all sorts of stuff the Big Three never do. Which ones (apart from vague promises) are building out international fast charging networks? It all costs..

Tesla has made a large investment in their future. The biggest problem they have right now, is that they can't meet demand. That is a problem many companies wish they had. . I think we will know more as Q2 ends this year where Tesla is in production. They need to be getting closer to 5,000 cars a week, and get to 20,000 a week by 2020. I still don't know how they will do it with one facility. I think at some point they will need to open new plants.

They have actually scoped out two production sites; one in China and one in the Netherlands.

Musk is a canny buyer. If anything he'll swoop on an existing plant in the USA or maybe even Canada to cover that region as he did with Fremont. Latest numbers for Model 3 look encouraging and sales of Models S and X are also doing OK. Model Y production capacity needs to be shovel-ready soon as that has massive potential. The CUV sector is red hot at the moment globally.

Dutchy wrote:

It thought this was due to the enormous investments for the expansion with the model 3 etc.

So what needs to be done? Use these investments to their fullest, then Tesla should be plenty of profitable, although their next project is the Tesla Truck, so it might be a while. I think I read somewhere that the profit margin on an S-model is something of 25%-30%.